


Imaginary Friends

by ishouldwritethatdown



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: AU - No Upside Down, AU - Sara Lives, Adopted Children, Adopted Sibling Relationship, Alternate Universe, El & Will Are Supernaturally Connected, Family Feels, Fate, Gen, Imaginary Friends, POV Alternating, Parent-Child Relationship, Psychic Bond, there are a lot of elements of this AU that are different to canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-24 01:23:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20017951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishouldwritethatdown/pseuds/ishouldwritethatdown
Summary: “I made a friend today,” Will announced happily, as he bounded into the kitchen with his brother trailing behind him.“She’sinvisible,” added Jonathan, with a subtly sarcastic flourish of the hands. At nine years old, he’d mastered the art of making fun of his little brother without spoiling his games.She gave him a grateful and in-on-it smile.“No, she’s sy-kick,” Will corrected. “Her name is El.”





	Imaginary Friends

**Author's Note:**

> TW: Implied/Referenced parental homophobia (from Lonnie). I don't think I made it too severe because we already know what kind of shit he does, and I don't think it needs reiterating. But if you're sensitive to that kind of thing, please proceed with caution. Stay safe.

“I made a friend today,” Will announced happily, as he bounded into the kitchen with his brother trailing behind him.

“She’s _invisible_ ,” added Jonathan, with a subtly sarcastic flourish of the hands. At nine years old, he’d mastered the art of making fun of his little brother without spoiling his games.

She gave him a grateful and in-on-it smile.

“No, she’s sy-kick,” Will corrected. “Her name is El.”

Will had been about due for another imaginary friend, since it had been almost a month since the creation of his last. Joyce hadn’t been able to keep up with the story since about four characters ago, but she still tried to ask interested questions and encourage him.

“That’s nice, sweetie,” she said. “Does she want to stay for dinner?”

Will nodded. “Yes, please.”

“Go and wash your hands, then. Jonathan will help me set a place for her.”

As Will left the room, Jonathan gave her a look that could be summarised as ‘thoroughly fed up with his brother’s antics’ which was one he’d been adopting more frequently of late. He was starting to grow out of ‘kid stuff’ and got exasperated by Will’s failure to grow up four years faster than he had. Joyce tried to remind him when she could that he was still little, and mouthed a silent ‘thank you’ when he laid out a plate and cutlery on the fourth side of the table. Maybe El’s presence would distract the kids from the absence of the man who was meant to be in that chair – it wasn’t Lonnie’s fault he worked evenings, but he could at least try to make up for it when he was home…

“So tell me about El,” Joyce said when Will returned, finding that she needed the distraction just as much. “What does she like to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said thoughtfully. “She doesn’t like talking very much. But she’s very good at listening.”

The other things El was good at revealed themselves over the next weeks. Namely, hide-and-seek – he said that she showed him all of the best hiding spots in and around the house, and she was very good at the game herself because she would sneak from hiding-spot to hiding-spot when he wasn’t looking, quieter than a mouse.

“Is that El?” Joyce asked, peering over Will’s shoulder as he coloured in a drawing. She could recognise his self-portrait, with its straight, short brown hair and colourful clothes and big, beaming smile. It was the same way he’d always drawn himself, although by now the technical skill of the drawing made it much, much more recognisable as a human being.

With a slightly more subdued expression beside him, he was drawing a child with a mess of short brown curls and blue clothes. In between them was an orange splodge recognisable as the Bruleys’ cat from down the road, who often wandered up and down the track, pouncing on birds and voles foolish enough to stray into its path. He nodded, “We met Thomson on the track, and she was scared, so I showed her how to pet him and not get scratched. I think she likes cats now.”

She also liked Eggo waffles, in the sort of fixated way that little kids decided they liked something. Will had probably seen an ad on the TV, or had had his eye caught by a display in the store, and decided that the best way to go about asking to try them was to say that El was having a particularly strong craving for Eggo waffles today.

“Why don’t we try regular waffles?” suggested Joyce, after this had happened a few times. “Do you think El would like that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll have to ask.”

Most of his characters faded into obscurity after a few months. Before now, the longest any had lasted so far was a year (except for Will the Wise, who was less of a character and more of a direct extension of Will) but El had already far surpassed that milestone, and showed no signs of stopping. She didn’t have a long string of adventures, like some of his imaginary friends did – she was more of an everyday companion, a confidante. Laying her a place at the table for her eventually happened so frequently that when Lonnie finally did get an evening off one weeknight, it unsettled Joyce to see him sitting in El’s seat.

“What’s wrong with you?” Lonnie asked bluntly to their sons, when they picked awkwardly at their food, flicking glances at his plate, drenched in gravy when it usually stayed clean and bare. “What, you don’t like your mother’s cooking? I work my ass off to provide for you boys, you understand that?”

“Lonnie, don’t do this now,” she tried to settle him, but he cut her off.

“No, I won’t let my sons grow up ungrateful, you hear me?” he glared at her, and a cold chill went through her at the tone he used. He turned his eyes to the boys, and she felt the urge to step in front of them, hide them from this dark edge that he’d sharpened into himself. He wasn’t always like this. Was he?

“It’s great, Mom,” Jonathan said hurriedly, and scooped some of the food up with his fork. “Really nice. Me and Will are just tired. Right, buddy?”

Will nodded, his cheeks full of meatloaf like a hamster hoarding food, in an urgent effort not to displease their father further. Anger bubbled up inside her, and she refused to press down the feeling of _invasion_ he’d brought to the evening. He was not welcome here. And she would tell him that. When the boys retreated into their rooms after they helped her wash the dishes.

He shouted about the lights he was paying to keep on, the unwelcome chill in the house that was, in his opinion, as the man and the breadwinner, his own. Out of his mouth slipped his own secret; the lost job, the remortgaging her parents’ house without her knowledge, the promise of new work, soon. Then all the posturing made sense, and she hated him, _hated_ him, and he needed to get out of _her house_ right this instant and he could damn well walk his own ass to a friendly bed for the night because they sure didn’t have one for him in here.

The slamming of the front door rang through the house and left it hers again, though still tainted with the memory of what he’d briefly turned their home into.

When she knocked and opened the door to Will’s room later, he scrambled his drawings off the bed and flung open the book he’d been leaning on – a ratty old encyclopedia of some kind – trying to hide the imagination that had made him so happy for so long.

“Hey, baby,” she said, as softly as she could, and he slumped into a less rigid position when he saw it was her. Only slightly less. His fingers were curled around the edges of the book, tilting it up like a shield.

“Are you and Dad done yelling, now?”

“I’m sorry,” she winced as she rounded the bed and crouched to pick up the drawings, smoothing the paper where it had crumpled in his haste. “I wish you hadn’t heard any of that.”

“I didn’t, really,” he said uncertainly. “It was just loud.”

But the knowledge that they were arguing was disturbing on its own, without the context of their words. She knew that. She hoped Jonathan had had his music turned up loud enough to ignore it.

The work-in-progress he’d flung was a drawing of himself and El – as easily recognisable as his own self-portrait, now, even though she’d evolved somewhat alongside him. Her hair was longer, and she continued to match him in height. None of Will’s imaginary friends had ever _grown up_ before. But then, El wasn’t just an imaginary friend anymore. She was basically family.

“What’s that she’s holding?” Joyce pointed at a blue and orange splodge in her hand.

“Her walkie-talkie,” he answered, taking the drawing and accentuating the antenna with his blue crayon. “It’s how she talks to me all the way from the Big City.”

“Ah, yes, I see now,” she smiled, nodding. The Big City didn’t refer to any real city, but a lot of Will’s characters seemed to originate from there – the huge, mysterious machine of opportunity that he conceptualised all cities to be, after visiting Indianapolis last year. “What does she think of the City?”

He shrugged. “It’s loud. But she likes it better than where she was before.”

“Where was that?”

“Bad Place.”

Ah, the Bad Place. The villain of many-a story, over the years. Though not so much recently, she reflected. “Oh, well I’m glad she got out of there,” she said.

“Me too,” he smiled, and continued his colouring-in.

El did not stay a secret from Lonnie forever.

Not that they’d ever actually agreed to keep her a secret, the three of them. But they all kept some unspoken vow to leave her name unsaid, her lovingly-drawn portraits hidden, when Lonnie was at home, which was feeling more and more like an invasion of their family than a completion of it. Joyce dreaded the fallout of each of his stints at home, where he would impress on Jonathan the importance of growing up a man, and tell him again how many girlfriends he’d already had by age thirteen, and insist on playing baseball with Will until his arms and legs ached well into the next day.

She had a bad feeling about letting Lonnie pick up Will from the Wheelers’ house, but she was working an extra shift at work, and he’d insisted on doing it before she could ask Karen if she would mind running him home instead.

She got a call at work from a frantic Jonathan, saying that he couldn’t find Will anywhere, and he didn’t know what had happened but there were drawings scattered around the kitchen all torn up, and—

And even as she trekked through the woods around the house with her eldest, calling Will’s name, she knew they wouldn’t find him until he wanted to be found. Because El had showed him how to hide, how to occupy the smallest amount of space possible. It was uncanny the way he seemed to try and melt into his surroundings sometimes, even in plain view, so that he was less of a target.

He materialised out of the shed when he heard them returning to the yard, and fell into a hug with her and his brother. “He tried to take El away,” he whimpered. She held him tighter, and wondered if he was imagining El pressed in close with them too.

Joyce confronted Lonnie. She yelled. She raged. He told her that no son of his was going to live his life away with the fairies, playing make believe. She told him that in that case, Will wasn’t his son. From this point on, they had nothing whatsoever to do with each other. It wasn’t as simple as that, of course, but saying it out loud meant she had a goal to work towards. And it sure stung him hard to hear it.

On the night that she finally banished Lonnie Byers from her house for good with signed paper and not so much as a single spoken word, her sons created a fort in the woods. It was a secret castle, where all friends – including imaginary ones – were welcome. Will pinned up drawings of Will the Wise, and photographs of his Party, but none of his pictures of El were salvaged enough to put up. On her visits to the Castle, she looked out for replacements, but they never came. El dwindled out of conversation. Will stopped laying her a place at the table.

“That’s kid stuff,” he mumbled, when she asked eventually. “I’m in middle school now.”

And it was strange, to mourn an imaginary member of their family, but that was what she decided that feeling was. El had always grown _with_ Will – she somehow hadn’t imagined that he would ever grow _out_ of her.

She kept a box of Eggos in the freezer. Just in case.

They stayed there, becoming part of the freezer like El had been part of their daily routine, until one night in the fall of 1984, when Joyce was woken by the pop of the toaster and the muttered curses that signified burning your hands on your toast. She padded out of her bedroom, intending to scold Jonathan for midnight snacking, but stopped short, seeing Will there instead. She stayed closed to the wall, in shadow, and watched as he collected toppings from the cupboards with some difficulty.

With the same amount of delicate care he had always had while making Eggos for El, he arranged the sweets he’d found – whip cream, Halloween themed sprinkles, a cup of Reeses Pieces – on the waffles. He then sat back in his chair at the kitchen table and stared at the plate, as if willing it to move.

He began to whisper-chant. “I’m sorry, please, please, come on, come on, please, please, please, where are you, where are you, where are you…”

He closed his eyes, continuing to mouth his desperate prayer, and rocking back and forth ever so slightly. He slowed, braced himself—and opened his eyes to an untouched plate. After a moment, his expectations fading into disappointment, his face screwed up in anticipation of tears. He snatched the plate from the table as he stood, and thrust the contents into the bin, along with the rest of the Eggos.

“Stupid,” he hissed. “So stupid.”

Joyce crept back to bed, and didn’t mention it to him in the morning. She’d hoped he would come to her with the issue, but he didn’t. She didn’t know what Will needed his imaginary friend for at 2AM on a Tuesday, but she knew that Will had always like to decorate El with rainbows. She knew that he felt safe to be himself with El, and that the real world wasn’t always so kind. So she sent him off to school with a kiss on the forehead and a promise that she loved him very much, no matter what.

He rolled his eyes, slouching out of her reach, and said, “Yeah, Mom, I know.”

And she hoped he did.

* * *

His daughter would not share her imaginary friend.

That was the issue Sara had come to him with today; El kept talking to him instead of to her, and when she tried to join in the pretending, she snapped at her to stop telling lies about her friend. Twice, Sara had suggested by way of the imaginary Will that they go and play a game in the garden. Both times, El had shot the idea down, insisting that Will had not suggested that. Sara didn’t seem to apply the same rules to Will as she did to other people, which was fair enough, but she also didn’t get that when El said Will didn’t want to do something, it was her saying that _she_ didn't want to do that thing.

“Why don’t you make up your own imaginary friend?” Hopper suggested, towelling his hands dry as the dishes began to drip-drip-drip on the draining board.

“I did,” said Sara, “but she doesn’t want to play with _my_ imaginary friend. And imaginary friends are no good for playing with, anyway.”

As he approached the girls’ door, he heard El talking into the walkie-talkie. It wasn’t a real one, just half of a colourful pair of rounded-plastic nightmare toys, a present to Sara from Diane’s boyfriend, Bill, who so clearly didn’t have children it hurt. Hop had removed the batteries years ago, but that didn’t bother the kids at all, using them constantly in their pretend games where they were never far enough out of earshot for it to be a real issue.

“Yes.”

Pause.

“Why?”

Longer pause.

“Yes.”

Hopper stifled a chuckle. When Sara had first said El was ‘talking’ into the walkie-talkie, he’d had a moment where he struggled to imagine his daughter holding a conversation that consisted of whole sentences. This was more in line with what he was used to – the same kinds of conversations she had with her sister, which was when she did her most talking.

Other parents – and other non-parents, namely Bill – tried to impress on him the importance of communication, and speech therapy in order to achieve that communication, but from his point of view, it was a non-issue. Okay, so the kid didn’t like stringing words together into sentences. But it wasn’t as if she ever had trouble getting her point across, at least now that she’d settled in. She would nod and point and smile a thank-you, and that was fine. She was getting on fine.

Compared to when she first moved in, and she would duck and hide into any small space she could find and refuse to be found until she was absolutely sure no one was looking for her, she was positively excelling at communication. And he told her that, in big smiles and hair ruffles, which she spoke fluently by now. It was good for her to figure out how to be comfortable speaking aloud on her own terms. Though it was funny – in the pauses between her answers, his brain filled in almost-words and the fuzzy static of white noise coming from outside the apartment sounded as if they were responses to El’s transmissions, not quite distinct enough to be heard through the door.

He waited for her answering double-rap on the floor before he entered and sat down cross-legged with her. He was reassured to notice that the walkie was as silent and dead-batteried as ever. “Who you talkin’ to, kiddo?”

“Will,” she answered, and she didn’t snatch and claw and hoard that information like she was afraid Hop might take her precious Will away, so that was worthy of a smile. Her curls were coming in nicely, and she bounded around in her dungarees with almost the same vigour as Sara (though she was admittedly hard to match). You’d never know she wasn’t always a normal kid.

“Ah, Will again. And where’s Will calling from?”

“Hawkins.”

He blinked, and those lab reports he’d slogged through for the investigation dredged themselves up in his memory. Pseudo-scientific buzzwords like _ESP_ and _telekinetic and telepathic tendency_ ran through his head, and he almost had to shake it to get them out. Obviously the kid hadn’t pulled the name out of thin air. She had to have heard him mention his hometown at some point, that was all.

“Oh, uh, okay. That’s… nice.” He felt like he’d dropped his train of thought.

El was staring at him, expecting him to go on.

 _Pick it back up. Pick it back up._ “Sara… is a little upset.. that she doesn’t know Will like you do,” he said, choosing his words carefully. _Don’t imply he’s not real. Don’t insist she has to share_. “She feels a little left out. Maybe she could play with you and Will sometime? Not all the time, only when you both want to. And you’d have to make sure she knew what he was doing, so she doesn’t have to guess, and no one gets mad.”

Hopper didn’t have much experience with siblings, but from what he’d picked up off Diane and her brothers, the slightly hesitant nod El gave him was leagues more obliging than he might’ve expected.

The girls would play a slightly ad libbed version of ‘Guess Who?’ where Sara would try to glean as many details about Will as she could from El with yes-or-no questions, and through this method it was reported to Hopper that Will was their age, had light brown hair in a bowl cut, and was not, as most boys apparently were, ‘gross’. Though he suspected El had been confused by that last question.

The first time El poked him awake in the middle of the night, he was startled. Usually if one of the kids woke him, it would be Sara, beating him up with a plastic bowl until he agreed to pour some milk and cereal into it. El would often wake at the same time, but she wouldn’t partake in the violence. She preferred to be independent. And try to pour the milk and cereal by herself.

She was six (and a half) years old when she first woke him, and all the worst-case scenarios clamoured in his head; the apartment is on fire. Someone’s dying. Those bastards at the Department of Energy changed their minds and now government goons are going to break down the door and take El away.

“Will had a nightmare,” she told him.

“Oh,” he said, bleary eyes trying to focus on her in the dark. She sounded a little shaken. “Would hot cocoa make Will feel better?”

El never wanted to elaborate on her dreams or why she felt the need to assign them to Will instead of to her, but he didn’t really have to guess. If they were really extremely lucky, the memories of the lab and everything that happened would fade with growth and time, and she’d never remember being anything but his daughter. She wouldn’t remember that El was short for Eleven, or why they called her one name at home and a different one at school. Jane was the name that her mother gave her, the one that was on the legal adoption papers that Hopper had signed, and El was the nickname that her fellow-infant sister had given her, and that was that.

Sometimes El woke gasping and yelling, and in the second before he opened the door he would hear Sara in their room trying to comfort her. El didn’t always foist her nightmares on Will; sometimes she was so busy trying to remember how to breathe that she didn’t have the words. But she didn’t take hot cocoa for those dreams. For those, she just wanted to be held.

Sara grew out of make-pretend when she grew into pop music. Some of the songs she’d beg for on records were atrocious, and he complained that putting her music next to his classics was an act of sacrilege. He still let her do it, even though it meant he learned the lyrics to ABBA songs against his will.

El, meanwhile, took a little longer to let go of the imaginary Will – but when she did, he didn’t even realise she was doing it. Weeks and then months went by before he noticed that he hadn’t overheard half of a walkie-talkie conversation in all that time. El hadn’t woken him for cocoa in the night since the week before Christmas, and that was a good thing, that she wasn’t having nightmares, but…

“How’s Will?” he asked over dinner one day, casual. He used to ask after him all the time, and she used to answer readily, but Sara looked at him like he’d grown a second head. El just shrugged, and pushed more green beans into her already-full mouth. And that was the end of it.

Until it wasn’t.

Hop was catching the end of some spacey documentary that Sara was watching when the girls’ door slammed against the wall as it was flung open. El strode from the room with purpose, blood streaming from her nose and an urgency in her eyes that apparently prevented her from wiping it.

“We have to go to Hawkins. Will is in trouble.”

And Hop didn’t know how he was argued into his car by an angry and desperate middle schooler, but suddenly he’s turning the key in his ignition and driving.

“How can Will be in trouble?” Sara asked, handing El another tissue to add to the wad that she was pressing against her nose. “He’s _make-pretend_.”

“How do you know he’s in trouble?” Hop asked.

“ _Dad_.”

“What?”

“Will’s not real! He was just a game!” She looks like she’s about to start tearing her hair out in a gesture that’s so like her mother’s trademark ‘ _I’m the only sane person in the room_ ’ that he almost forgets to look away from the mirror and back at the road. He can’t really blame her; he doesn’t feel particularly sane himself, at the moment.

“I just know,” El said, ignoring her sister. “I saw him.”

“You had a dream,” she said flatly.

“I’m not stupid,” she snapped. “I know dreams aren’t real. This was real.”

“You can’t—”

“Sara, hush,” he said, because they were doing his head in with their bickering. Sometimes, they were inseparable. Best friends. Other times… this. “Jane,” he said, because he needed it to be clear this was serious. “Where are we going?”

She took a deep breath, cleansing her anger like he taught her, and answered, “Mirkwood.”

And maybe he remembered Hawkins better than he wished he did, because he faltered and sputtered, “That’s not a real place.”

“It’s in the Hobbit.”

He bit back the question, ‘When the hell did you read Lord of the Rings?’ because that wasn’t important right now. “What’s it _really_ called?”

“It’s…” she screwed up her face tight, trying to remember, “between Cornwallis and Kerley.”

Maybe she picked up the name Hawkins from him, but there was no way he’d mentioned that intersection specifically, with the amount that he talked about his hometown. So, either she’d gone to the library and tracked down a detailed map of a rural section of Indiana, or there really was a boy named Will from Hawkins.

It was cold and dark on the road called Mirkwood. Sara shivered, clutching her jacket closer around her, but El walked purposefully off the road with not much more than a determined fire in her eyes to keep her warm. Hopper insisted on handing her a flashlight, despite her assertions that she didn’t need one – she claimed she knew this road, these woods. And maybe she did, but things were different in the dark, so he insisted. And it meant he could keep track of her easily in between the shouts of Will’s name, beam swishing back and forth in the dark.

“I want to go home,” Sara mumbled beside him.

“You could have stayed in the car,” he murmured back, giving her a look that he knew she understood. _Don’t pretend you don’t want to see where this leads._

“WILL!”

…

…

…

“EL!”

Hopper’s heart stopped, and so did his footsteps.

“EL, I’M OVER HERE!”

A stumbling run over shadows and tree roots and he’s joining in the yelling until his flashlight is returning the glint of a mangled bike frame and a mangled leg. The boy it was attached to looked almost familiar. The girls’ age, with straight, light brown hair in a bowl cut. Wide, hazel eyes, locked firmly onto El’s.

“It’s really you,” he breathed, voice croaking with the start of adolescence.

She nodded, eyes equally wide.

“Okay, kid,” Hop said, making the boy jump. He really hadn’t noticed anyone but El coming to his rescue. “We’re gonna get this bike off you and get you to the hospital, alright?”

“Home first,” he urged. “It’s not far. My mom and my brother, they’ll be worried.”

* * *

Joyce already had her coat on and was out the door when the car rolled up their drive, headlights illuminating her and Jonathan on the porch. When the lights died as the engine was turned off, she tried to peer at the car for police markings, heart pounding in her chest. Will should have been home an hour and a half ago. She should have gone looking the _minute_ he’d been late home from the Wheelers’, but it had been ‘I’m sure he just got talking to Dustin’ and ‘Maybe he stopped by the Castle first’ until…

Until he wasn’t here, and it might already be too late—

“Don’t worry, he’s okay,” said an impossibly familiar voice as he stepped out of the truck. “Busted his leg, scared himself half to death, but he’ll be fine.”

And she said, “ _Hop_?” because that was the hardest part of this to process right now, in the dark of her driveway. Jim Hopper. Of the Hawkins High School class of ’59, who’d promised never to be caught dead in this town again. _That_ Jim Hopper. Was bringing her boy home to her late one November night in ’84.

“Joyce?” he said.

“Mom,” said Will, and that was more important; embracing her boy, who was wobbling slightly on one leg as he leaned against the frame of the car. He smelled of earth and sweat, and his throat was scratchy, but he was alright. He was alright.

“Oh, thank god. Thank god.” She pushed back tears when she pulled away, and turned to Hopper, on the other side of the truck’s hood. “What on earth are you doing out here, how did you find him?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but Will jumped in before he could. “El found me,” he said, smiling. “Just like she always does.”

That’s when she noticed that out of the back seat of the car had slunk a little girl who wasn’t so little as she had been the last time Will had drawn her. Her wavy brown hair was tied back in a ponytail, and her eyes were dark and serious, but not unkind. She smiled a little awkwardly, an attempted mirror to Will’s. It was so surreal that looking to Hopper like they were suffering companions in Mr. Wright’s chemistry class again seemed suddenly normal. From the look on his face, Will was as much of a mythical being to him as El was to her.

There was no use trying to make sense of what had happened, she realised, as she looked between the four children and one other adult in the yard, and, for a fleeting incomprehensible moment, being unable to understand who belonged in whose family. Some friendships simply weren’t meant to stay imaginary.


End file.
